The intelligent design debate: Part I

Since my own editorial board has now joined every pundit in the country in tackling Intelligent Design, what do I myself have to lose? Apart from my sanity, my reputation and my last friend on campus, I mean? I daresay I am the only member of the Princeton faculty whose library includes in five leather-bound volumes the complete works of Archdeacon Paley, the intelligent designer of the celebrated "watchmaker analogy." The physical world, he argues, reveals such complex construction, cunning artifice and harmonious functionality as might be found in an expertly crafted timepiece. The human mind must acknowledge that the former no less than the latter is the work of a master craftsman working from an intelligent plan.

Not so, writes the skeptical biologist, Prof. Richard Dawkins, author of "The Blind Watchmaker," a work that, according to its misleading subtitle, demonstrates "why evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design." That book is not in my library on account of financial and spatial constraints, but I have read it carefully. It successfully convicts Paley of confusing biology and theology, all the while confusing biology with philosophy. But why is a 21st century biologist quarrelling with an 18th century cleric? It's part of a long, sad story.

More than a hundred years ago, Andrew Dickson White, a courageous Christian humanist who was the first president of Cornell, published a great book, his "History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom." The warfare, I fear, was initiated by theologians. Famous episodes include the ecclesiastical condemnation of Galileo and heliocentrism and the prelatical rebuffs to Darwin's theory of natural selection in Victorian England. In both of those instances, and many more, scientific discoveries that could and should have nourished all seekers after truth were resisted by religious dogmatists who confused Hebrew poetry with laboratory reports. Sin in haste; repent at leisure.

Now that so much of religion's old cultural capital has been reallocated to science, the boot is on the other foot. Stephen Jay Gould finds it necessary to continue the posthumous persecution of Father Teilhard de Chardin begun in the Jesuit scientist's lifetime by his ecclesiastical superiors.

Should Intelligent Design be taught in our schools? Well, that depends upon the rubric under which it is proposed to teach it. Students surely ought to know that for many centuries a principal preoccupation of Western thought was the attempt to bridge a supposed gap between the physical world and a realm of spirit or "idea." Many educated people, of whom I am one of the least worthy, continue that quest today. Students should know that such a deep thinker as Augustine heard the voices of the material world murmuring "We did not create ourselves," and that Albert Einstein surfaced from his deep immersion in physical theory to report "Subtle is the Lord!" It is perhaps of passing interest that Sir Isaac Newton was apparently more interested in cracking the code of the Book of Daniel than in elaborating the Law of Gravity.

Such historical episodes, and hundreds more, may suggest that "the warfare of theology and science" is not the necessary condition that many on either side of the faith divide have come to accept. But Intelligent Design is a topic in the history of ideas, not a branch of the natural sciences. It is a meditation upon biology and botany and geology, but it is not a substitute for, or alternative to, biology, or botany, or geology.

Surely all people of whatever stripe of religious sensibility must seek to reconcile their experience with the operations of that faculty of reason that, according to widely shared belief, gives defining individuality to human nature. But the famous biblical definition of faith — "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" — hardly encourages us to categorize faith among the empirical sciences. Faith, Augustine insists, is reasonable. The same cannot be said, alas, of all the faithful. Recently when the citizens in a little town in rural Pennsylvania voted from office an entire school board that was trying to push an Intelligent Design curriculum, the televangelist Pat Robertson thus scolded the Darwinian voters: "You just voted God out of your city!" My own recourse under such circumstances is to prayer. Specifically, I utter a brief prayer from a refrigerator magnet posted by my daughter. It reads: "Lord, save me from Your followers!"

Of course nothing in this column suggests the actual cultural meaning of the Intelligent Design "debate." I'll try to explain that next week. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.